Social medicalization (II): Biomedical limits and proposals for primary care clinic

Social medicalization diminishes or even destroys the population’s autonomy regarding disease and healthcare and generates an endless demand on health services. It consists on an important challenge the SUS (Unified Health System). This article discusses the limits of biomedical knowledge and practices in relation to their contribution to the promotion of users’ autonomy and proposes some guidelines for handling these limits. It comes to the conclusion that intervention technologies, biomedical knowledge and its cognitive procedures contribute very little to patients’ autonomy. The article suggests a shift of the biomedical knowledge’s meanings, focused on the healing function of health professionals. This shift should be regarded as a mission to rebuild autonomy, prevent and heal the lived sicknesses, beside the ones that are diagnosed. It defends a reorganization of primary care biomedical clinic’s values and goals, such as the diagnosis’ relativity, the end of disease and risk ontology, the end of the control obsession, the fight against biomedical dogmatism, and giving priority to therapeutics.